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Dead Soldiers’ Bedrooms

I once spent the night in the bedroom of a soldier who had died six months earlier in Iraq. It was Memorial Day weekend, 2004, in Des Moines, Iowa. The soldier was PV2 Kurt Frosheiser, killed at age twenty-two by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. I was in Des Moines at the invitation of his father, Chris Frosheiser, who died in 2008 of prostate cancer. When I visited, Chris’s apartment was cluttered with Kurt’s things—the CDs and sports gear that had belonged to his life before the war, and the memorial spurs and plaques and medals that had come after his death. Kurt’s bedroom didn’t have the look of permanence. Everything still seemed fresh and unsettled. His dust-covered Army shaving kit stood on the toilet tank, and his fatigues and combat boots hung in the closet alongside a guitar. It was as if he had come home on leave and was away for a few days or weeks, and the room was awaiting his return.

The bedrooms in these haunted photographs by Ashley Gilbertson, from this weekend’s Times Magazine, have been empty for much longer than Kurt’s had been in 2004. They’ve had more time to adjust—they look composed and orderly, with every object arranged in its place by the hand of someone who loved its former occupant, as if the rooms are meant to remain this way forever. They’ve begun to take on the air of a shrine.

Gilbertson, who published a book of Iraq war photos called “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” has been obsessively photographing grave sites and bedrooms of fallen soldiers ever since he covered the battle of Falluja in November, 2004, along with the Times’s Dexter Filkins. Filkins wrote the essay that accompanies these pictures. His last paragraph, which describes his thoughts in the moments just after he sees a soldier cut down, is one of the finest things anyone has written about our wars:

And at that moment, you think about how the word of his death will travel; how it will depart Iraq or Afghanistan and move across the ocean and into the United States and into the town where he lives, Corinth, Miss., say, or Benwood, W.Va., and into the houses and the hearts of the people who love him most in the world. And at that moment, standing there, looking down on the dead man, you can wonder only what the family will do when the terrible news finally arrives, how they will resist it and wrestle with it and suffer from it, and how they will cope and how they will remember.